For years, U.S. schools and children have lagged behind international standards in reading, arithmetic, and other areas of academic achievement. American schools are in dire need of improvement, and education is increasingly becoming a top priority. Although nearly every state in the country is developing higher standards for what students should be learning, along with means for assessing student progress, most of the solutions to-date have been quick-fixes with no noticeable long-term impact.
Most efforts undertaken to improve education fail because they are student-focused, rather than being directed to impact the quality of teaching inside classrooms. Teachers are not incompetent, but the methods they use are severely limited, and the system of instruction currently used has no means in place for self-improvement. Thus, often it is the teaching technique, rather than the teachers that must be improved.
Studies such as the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have observed teaching techniques in several cultures in order to learn about effective classroom teaching styles in order to help refocus educational reform efforts. In order to improve teaching styles and efforts, a forum must be provided to enable teachers to engage in career-long learning. Classrooms must become laboratories for teacher improvement. If provided with a method for improving their lesson plans and classroom time usage, teachers can change the way in which students learn. With improved capability for delivering multimedia content, modern computer networks can serve as a delivery means for facilitating teacher improvement.
Computer-based education systems are known in the art, and have made major technical advances in recent years, especially with the advent of the Internet as a cross-platform communication means. One of the first and most well-known systems can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 3,405,457, titled “Versatile Display Teaching System” to Bitzer. In this system, a plurality of display stations serve as terminals which interact with a mainframe computer to display educational materials and to allow the user to interact with the mainframe via an input device such as a keyboard.
Much progress and specialization has been made in the years since the development the invention covered by U.S. Pat. No. 3,405,457. As processing costs have dropped and computer-networking equipment has become faster and more reliable, so have educational software products. More recent systems incorporate multimedia systems as well as high-speed networks such as the Internet, in which students may connect to an educational server system through phone lines as well as through network connections such as T1, cable connections, and ADSL. Many modern computer-based educational systems emphasize interactivity and group communication to allow students and teachers to interact in real-time. An example of a system that allows a teacher to interact with students who are geographically remote may be found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,437,555.
More recently, the personal computer has become a highly saturated general-purpose tool with a great deal of processing power. By coupling the power of the personal computer with the communication capabilities offered by the Internet, many colleges have begun offering online study courses in which students interact with one-another and with teachers via common communication channels available on the Internet such as chat rooms, e-mail, and other messaging systems, and with educational materials presented in the form of web pages.
Computer-based education systems have helped to address logistical drawbacks associated with the traditional classroom, in which all students were expected to be physically present to receive instruction at one time. By divorcing the requirement of physical presence and, in some cases, the need for simultaneous presence, modern computer-based education systems allow for the education of many students who otherwise may be unable to attend.
Despite their advantages, until recently computer-based education systems required specialized software, and in some cases specialized hardware. More recently, computer-based education systems have begun to embrace the Internet as a cross-platform medium to avoid the need for costly and specialized software and hardware. An example of a computer-based education system which uses the Internet as an information transport means may be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,149,411, titled “Computer-Based Educational System”, which also uses the Internet as a stockpile of reference material with which teachers may enhance their coursework for students.
Although computer-based educational systems have been adapted to address many of the logistical problems associated with the need for a physical classroom, their improvements have been student-centered. They ignore the fact that the traditional classroom has been, and still is, the means by which the majority of students are taught. Currently, there is a need for an interactive, case-based system for professional development of teachers. Because it should be geared toward improving the teaching skills of teachers, it is desirable that it incorporate multimedia content such as video cases of teachers giving lessons to students in order to allow a user-teacher to observe the classroom behavior of both the teacher and the students. It is equally important to incorporate video content into assessments or exercises (assignments) in order to allow teacher mentors to measure the effectiveness of such interactive, case-based teacher professional development systems in assisting user-teachers in the observation of classroom behavior of teachers and students.
It is an object of the present invention to provide such a system. Other more specific objects will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art in light of the disclosure provided herein.